Yahoo Narrows Focus, Kills Off Some Services

Yahoo has decided to allow a bunch of services to call it a day, as the company narrows down their focus to concentrate on four core areas, helping the company get in line with their mission statement. Basically, half a dozen services will no longer be seen as useful by the time the end of this month arrives, where the top brass at Yahoo intends to focus on “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.” As for the core areas that Yahoo will look at? They include communications, digital magazines, search and video.

Basically, the less popular products and services will be the first to go, while other widely-loved features from other services will be integrated into core Yahoo experiences in order to preserve a remnant of their legacy. People Search will bite the dust from today onward, which means you will no longer be able to use the search directory to seek out people specifically.

Having picked up Xobni last year, Yahoo too, will no longer offer Xobni to the masses, with users of Xobni.com and Smartr products’ functionality ending today as well. In addition to that, every single bit of data on the Xobni Cloud will be reduced to nothing when August 20th rolls around, but fret not – there will be a “spiritual” survivor, so to speak, since many of the functions of Xobni products happen to be available in Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Toolbar for Chrome is also set to be removed from the Chrome web store, where users will hopefully migrate to the currently available Yahoo extension instead. Yahoo Shine, too, will call it quits at the end of this month, where current alternatives include Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel. [Press Release]